I'm more concerned that Harvard is apparently somehow getting in and viewing comments prospective students are making in a private Facebook group--since presumably they are not a member of the group.
That this is possible is and should be a concern. After all, I think you'd agree that no third parties should be reading, for example, a private Facebook group for LQBT* people who--for whatever reason--are not interested in being out of the closet at this point in time? This is probably precisely why chilling effect was brought up: Not all of us are so stupid as to think that somehow this only is every going to happen with this specific particular private Facebook group getting viewed by Harvard and Harvard alone. It's more likely that this is what we're going to get as a canary--and you don't have to like whomever serves as your canary.
I think the key word is 'probably,' and the odds are that we're going to be able to use things like those Blender 3D modeling tutorials as canaries to determine just how automated the demonetization is. I'm not sure Leonard French would be a good canary for 'lawsuit' making the banned list, he might function more as a part of a canary set for telling if that filter is in and if there's a whitelist...
I'm not talking about my workplace, though I'm starting to suspect I am describing your workplace and the problems caused by you walking in.
Since apparently you need a bit of help: Remote workers' coworkers do not necessarily know what those remote workers even look like, which means that you have the potential ability to have them judge you purely by your personality and your work--and do so more fairly than you could expect them to do if they knew, for example, that you are a woman. This does, however, make being a remote worker not so good for those whose personalities and/or skills are not good.
You're on/. and I can tell that you have been here for significantly longer than I have been. (Only 5 digits compared to my 7!) It feels really, really strange to be telling somebody I presume has been on the internet for much longer than I've been that people hide their sex/race online for reasons...
If the workplace is hostile or not depending only on if you enter the door, then we've already identified the source of the hostility.
Yes, it is interesting that people with good looks generally can get away rather easily with having horrible personalities, while somebody whose looks are...ah...distinct in undesirable ways can be the quite pleasant and considerate without people giving them much credit for it--and that people are going to judge personality a lot more accurately when they don't know that Mr Complete Jerkass has movie star looks & Ms Great Personality was not in fact kidding about what the limits are on facial reconstruction...
(Yes, we've some pretty decent evidence that pretty people can get away with a lot more and visa versa. Some have been repeated mostly to try to get people aware that no, really, looks count for a lot.)
When your so called democracy has paid high-speed lanes, what do you expect from your Internet service?
Well, given that you can get Gbit internet some places if you're willing to pay more for the connection, I'm not sure I'm seeing much difference really.
Except that lack of Net Neutrality laws will allow ISPs and such to be sued for the content they prioritize/deprioritize. That's what this is all about, ultimately. Net Neutrality protects ISPs from (some) lawsuits. It won't after this change goes through. If it goes through.
The problem is that what we had was regulations, not laws. Laws would provide the ISPs reliably with that protection in court, and given that the MAFIAA and co have been moving to going after ISPs, the odds are likely very good that ISPs will not fight a law that gives them those protections even if Net Neutrality is explicitly intrinsic to getting said protections.
Well, if we're going to talk about my current job; their offices are in entirely in NYC. I'm not going to keep working with them if they decide for some reason I must work from their office, because NYC is expensive and they don't pay anywhere near enough to cover the cost of actually living in NYC. The point really would be to discourage them by upping the cost to them by making such a demand.
I overall suspect that the theory that this is a stealthed layoff is right--especially since IBM has a track record of supporting remote workers as a model and copious evidence that it's quite effective. Plus, you're going to lose money if they all stick around and you have to find sufficient space to have that many more people in your offices without breaking laws. The fire marshal alone might get rather annoyed.
It's pretty much done pretty much entirely for the benefit of the social media sites' owners--gamificaion increases views, which increases the money ads earn. The main thing that can be done to counter it at the moment is ad blocking, to break their part of the reward cycle.
to label alcoholic beverages with calorie information,
What the fuck is wrong with that?
There's been an ongoing problem with stupid, stupid girls who skip meals so they can 'spend' their calories on booze. This makes the alcohol have a stronger effect on them and causes all sorts of nutritional disorders because they're effectively cutting back on nutrients--yes, they end up thin. Starving yourself works quite well for that. This doesn't make it healthy, and quite a few of these twits end up in the ER with alcohol poisoning. Some who manage to avoid that will get brain damage.
It doesn't help that--outside of maybe Everclear--the calories contained in a serving of alcohol will vary from batch to batch, with some alcoholic beverages having greater variations than others.
The simple fact that nobody seems to be asking if the calorie information is in fact doing anything to counter obesity is also a problem. This is a theory, it is an easily tested theory, can we actually do that instead of assuming it's true? Given that my experience is that among those I know, the group of 'people who care' has been contained entirely with 'people who have eating disorders'...I'm a bit skeptical that giving the calorie counts actually works, and for making good nutritional choices? It's useless, because calories merely are a measure of energy, not of overall nutritional value, and you certainly cannot reduce that to a single number.
You'll likely need to contact the original authors. Getting sample surveys should be as easy as a polite request; getting at the raw data may take distinctly more, and it's probably best if you get a bit of a conversation going first, if nothing else to find out what information about the subjects is in there. If there's stuff with a strong risk of letting you identify subjects, they should be not very willing to share it. (Standard ethical rules: You don't out your subjects without their permission, and generally you insist they out themselves and you confirm.)
Not necessarily--a remote worker doesn't have quite the same contact with the culture in the workplace. It is not my employers' fault for hiring me if I find that, as a remote worker, I am managing to be protected from the hostile work environment created by the in-house culture. It can also be that, well, what makes the difference is as simple as if your coworkers can see you: being a remote worker can be quite sufficient to prevent discrimination for some.
I'd expect it to be easier to go for breach of contract, though, and I'd not assume that IBM's contract covers this already. You're assuming that the execs are listening to legal and their legal department is competent, and we've seen multiple cases where it is rather definitely not the case. Many times, what's actually being thought may be that it doesn't matter, nobody is going to dare take them to court anyway.
Plus, if I'm signing a contract for a job were I am out to be a remote worker? I'm not signing the contract unless it is clear that this is the job that I am being hired for--and if the contract says my employer can insist on it, I'm going to want it explicit in the contract that they pay for my relocation costs & possibly also a raise to counterbalance the effective paycut. (I'm not talking just commute time, but also issues such as differences local cost of living. What's a good salary in one place can be practically nothing in another.)
You need to also be factoring in the ability of the current power grid to withstand the vastly increased demand and the changes in the cost of electricity that will be involved, as well as overall logistics. I think the assumption by the study is probably not taking these issues into account--especially since it seems to involve interesting assumptions about the global availability of electricity (perhaps those involved in the study could use a nice tour of less-developed countries?) and the logistical problems caused by NIMBYism when it comes to building, maintaining, and doing the vital improvements to the power grid.
Regardless of the ultimate outcome, the problem is that this prediction is for the near future and global. We can make a pretty good guess how much electricity will be getting generated at best in a decade, if nothing else because any power plant that's going to be running by 2027 is already in the planning stages.
I'd not be surprised if we can make a reasonably accurate guess about the maximum potential capacity in 2037, given how long it can take simply to get power plants built in places with severe NIMBYism, and let's not forget that there's parts of the world where it is highly impractical to have a power grid...
Really, I'd place my bets on straight-up fuel cells winning, at least globally, for that last reason.
A good example of both genres--mysteries and ironic-twists--is one where you do enjoy rereading it despite the ending, because the endings will have been forshadowed properly. You'll not be trying to solve the mystery or be surprised by the twist again, you'll be looking for the things that give away the criminal beforehand, or made the ironic twist feel like it isn't just a sudden alien space bat swooping down from above but rather actually very appropriate.
I generally take the view that if they can't be bothered to make the trailer not have spoilers, the movie itself probably isn't worth seeing either. I don't count things that are misleading either by looking like spoilers or are spoilers but will send you in the wrong direction here--I mean that if I pretty much get everything but the end of the movie in the trailer, then I figure the movie itself is mostly padding.
I'm glad you mentioned Samurai Pizza Cats! The original show, by all reports, was just really meh--it wasn't bad, it hit all the right notes, it just was nothing whatsoever remarkable in quality any direction. The thing is, they couldn't give it an accurate dub, because of the state it arrived in: They didn't throw away the original script because that would require they actually got it in the first place.
Also, caring about the lip sync is definitely something that varies by culture...as is if the local preference is for subtitles or dubs...
You are aware that languages have levels of formality, and in many it's explicitly present? They're not just present, they're recognized well enough that there's names for the levels within the language and phrases that use it to describe somebody being too familiar (or distant) with a person. English is actually weird-ish in that it doesn't make the divisions clear in its modern form--you're made to guess what level of casualness to use at a given point.
There are similar problems with children who are never punished and let run wild as well.
You can punish a child without resorting to hitting them, and "letting them run wild" is not the only alternative.
That's nice. However, the problem is a large section of the population appears to believe exactly that--that it's either only beating for everything, or let their kids run wild--because that's pretty how pop psych interprets the research right now, with a sidecar of "Mai widdle angel would never [whatever, up to and including felonies that will get you murdered in jail]" right up until their precious is well into adulthood. Because, let's make this clear, it's utterly and completely true in their minds.
If you want to know how pop psych looks to somebody who's studied the actual subject, it's kind of like seeing people insisting that you can totally round pi...to 4...in any and all circumstances, but especially when dealing with small numbers.
Right now, it's pretty common for people with significant mental health issues to end up in prison anyway--either intentionally, or simply because mental health issues tend to do a number on your ability to not break laws. Many prison systems if not all now do provide mental health services, and aren't going to be pretty much stuck booting you out the door the moment you're together enough to no longer an immediate danger to self or others. (Incidentally, don't leave out the immediate part, it is important. It's not sufficient for you to be openly planning, say, to go shoot up a bunch of innocent orphans--if you're not going to be doing it by tomorrow, you can't be forcibly committed.)
Society already is picking up the costs for those who end up in severe enough crisis, and the social safety net has inherit to itself the assumption that it is not only possible & desirable to cure everything but this cure is just around the corner--which causes significant problems for anybody for whom this is not at all true. A lot of mental health issues may not be curable--and there's actually serious questions about if it'd be ethical to anyway--and what you actually can expect to attain is a tenuous to transient stability. A reliable support system built around the idea of providing the necessary resources to permit & enable the greatest possible degree of self-sufficiency possible would most likely ultimately prove cheaper to society overall.
The current system is, pretty much by law, forced to act like pills are majykkal potions which will work reliably, appear somehow in the patient's possessions, and induce the patient to take them. The fact that many patients may need a while to get to where they can get a job capable of covering their meds, may have bought into the horribly common belief that pills are majykkal potions of cure (not even health), or can flat-out be expected to have their medications stop working... Not only does the current state-run system ignore this which almost certainly increases the costs to society, the assumptions are sufficiently built in that it may be at best only impractical to pry them out through reform, and I've rather little expectation that the state will be particularly tolerant of any attempt to provide much aid outside of its control.
I'm not surprised by 'room and board, and pocket money,' but I'd want to see just how this differs from normal pay for teachers in those countries--both in amounts and local buying power. How much it pays can also change a lot depending on what skills you've got and what precisely you're teaching--in general K12 (or local equivalent) pays the least, if you don't count tutoring in.
Since I've got degrees from a university in an English-speaking country, I can get myself pretty easily a job teaching English in Japan--don't know about other countries--and I know that at points people have been able to fund going to college in Japan--and attending a place in Tokyo--by teaching English there. YMMV, of course.
English is considered one of the hardest languages to learn, for much the same reasons Arabic is on that list--it makes a lot of use of idiom and imagery, and English has a significantly large vocabulary because of its tendency to mug languages for spare vocabulary.
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are all on that list, too, and not just because of the use of Chinese characters: They all have some degree of tonality, which can literally change the meaning of a word--there's some sentences in Chinese which are the same syllable, repeatedly, with different tones...which make perfect sense if you have the required ear for telling. (If your native language is tonal, it may be easier, but...not necessarily. Also, 'one or two sillabels'? No. I speak two of those languages. I'm not even sure where you're getting the idea that tenses are any simpler--technically maybe, but that's only because they use particles for things most European languages use conjugation and declension to do, and English generally does with word order. Oh, and formal/informal distinctions exist and you can have a level of "More Formal Still" to "Very Close Informal" and using the wrong level with somebody is an insult. Gender also sometimes pops up, though not in the grammatical sense.)
Japanese and Chinese people's English can be bad because English is a hard, hard language--and, well, there's some distinctions between sounds, such as l & r, that their languages don't make. Learning those is surprisingly hard if you didn't start as an infant, and even then you might have trouble making those sounds yourself.
Unlikely, that. One of the acid tests for translation is to have them translate a text, producing a smooth translation, and then you hand their work to another translator to translate back, blindly of course. The back translation, if the initial translation is good, should be close to the original text--it doesn't need to be the same words, but you certainly should have the same 'sense' to it.
Mechanical translators are not really close to passing that test on a reliable basis, and computers may well need to be capable of reliably & accurately taking instructions in natural languages to reach that point. From experience, though, picking a language everybody in the group knows is likely to be the preference offline--they might be used to help close gaps in vocabulary and understanding of idiomatic language, but they'd be more annoying trouble in conversation than even the most mangled common tongue.
That's not quite how it works at all; Latin was a dead language--meaning no native speakers anymore--for most of its importance as a common language for international communications, which should be a big hint that the number of native speakers and their economic importance has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with a language getting the job.
French got popular because it was fashionable among the elites and used for international diplomacy. It fell out of use because...well...fashionable ought to be a hint, and France also pretty much screwed itself over on the 'international diplomacy' front. (See: French history.)
German fell out of use in science because WWI, WWII, and the fact that a rather stunningly large number of people for some reason just decided they really didn't want to be Germans and left. (See: World history.)
At this point it's probably more likely than not that English would actually go the way of Latin--it'll stay important for a significant period of time even if all English-speaking countries suddenly disappeared tomorrow, because so many people have it as a second language. It's somewhat easier than switching to Mandarin--English may be one of the hardest languages to learn, but unless your native tongue is tonal then the difficulties in English will definitely hit a lot farther into learning it than they will with learning Mandarin. Spanish...well, the different versions are generally mutually intelligible right now, but...
Though, really, if we're going by the largest population in the EU should be setting the importance of a language to the EU, I'd think then that Arabic would be hands-down the most important one by now.
Which wouldn't be quite a problem if a generic was out, or expected out anytime soon--have you seen some of what the FDA insists of generics? It's got to be 'exact same,' which has actually caused designs that are improvements to get bounced.
Yes. Because the concept of a "generic" is that it is marketed as identical to the brand name product except for the brand.
If they are not identical there could be cases where substituting the generic for the brand name or vice versa is DANGEROUS. And thefore marketing them as identical is dangerously misleading.
If the drug company has an improvement they should get the new improved drug approved. They can even patent it if they want (they might have to license the base drug/process in order to produce their improved variant).
I can tell you don't actually know what you're talking about!
First off, the generic is not necessarily identical, it normally is just substantially identical, as in "it has the exact same stats." It isn't necessarily a perfect clone, it's literally the sort of difference you get between a brand name product and something that's, well, not...and on occasions you will have perfectly valid medical reasons to prefer to go on-brand (or off, depending) such as allergies.
So, moving on. EpiPens are actually not that reliable in function--I forget what the failure rate is, but it's actually disturbingly high--and merely having your generic version simply work reliably is sufficient for the FDA to reject it as a generic.
Second, getting anything in the way of a medical device through the current FDA approval process is a Kafkaesque nightmare, especially when it's just a minor improvement on previous iterations as the FDA don't care, you're doing the testing from scratch. This is precisely why there's sometimes a distinct effort to avoid having the FDA decide to wave its magic wand over something and declare it a medical device--especially since yes, the absurdity implied by Kafkaesque is definitely present.
This is pretty much what is wanted when you're out to get regulatory capture: You get the regulations written so as to effectively ensure that you have little to no competition. Deregulation actually is not something Mylan would want--because if you made the regulations reasonable, they would have to actually spend money on things like making better EpiPens.
Which wouldn't be quite a problem if a generic was out, or expected out anytime soon--have you seen some of what the FDA insists of generics? It's got to be 'exact same,' which has actually caused designs that are improvements to get bounced.
It doesn't help that while yes, they did certainly cut down on that infamous paperwork backlog, they did a lot of it by rejecting as improperly-filled-out forms that, at the time they'd been filed, had been--and filing again with whatever the current version of the form is will just get you at the end of the queue, with no certainty that they won't change the rules between now and when they finally get around to actually processing it. Would it be too much to require that the paperwork be processed according to the rules at the time the paperwork was filed, at least if it's been allowed to sit around for a certain length of time beforehand? (If this seems dangerous: Combine it with soft transitions and penalties for the bureaucracy having too great a backlog, set up so that if that rule has to be applied to paperwork being processed now, the penalties for the backlog are also hitting.)
Well, I suppose that saves Mylan on bribes to get that precious, precious regulatory capture that they've also been using to block competing tech from the US market.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm more concerned that Harvard is apparently somehow getting in and viewing comments prospective students are making in a private Facebook group--since presumably they are not a member of the group.
That this is possible is and should be a concern. After all, I think you'd agree that no third parties should be reading, for example, a private Facebook group for LQBT* people who--for whatever reason--are not interested in being out of the closet at this point in time? This is probably precisely why chilling effect was brought up: Not all of us are so stupid as to think that somehow this only is every going to happen with this specific particular private Facebook group getting viewed by Harvard and Harvard alone. It's more likely that this is what we're going to get as a canary--and you don't have to like whomever serves as your canary.
I think the key word is 'probably,' and the odds are that we're going to be able to use things like those Blender 3D modeling tutorials as canaries to determine just how automated the demonetization is. I'm not sure Leonard French would be a good canary for 'lawsuit' making the banned list, he might function more as a part of a canary set for telling if that filter is in and if there's a whitelist...
I'm not talking about my workplace, though I'm starting to suspect I am describing your workplace and the problems caused by you walking in.
Since apparently you need a bit of help: Remote workers' coworkers do not necessarily know what those remote workers even look like, which means that you have the potential ability to have them judge you purely by your personality and your work--and do so more fairly than you could expect them to do if they knew, for example, that you are a woman. This does, however, make being a remote worker not so good for those whose personalities and/or skills are not good.
You're on /. and I can tell that you have been here for significantly longer than I have been. (Only 5 digits compared to my 7!) It feels really, really strange to be telling somebody I presume has been on the internet for much longer than I've been that people hide their sex/race online for reasons...
If the workplace is hostile or not depending only on if you enter the door, then we've already identified the source of the hostility.
Yes, it is interesting that people with good looks generally can get away rather easily with having horrible personalities, while somebody whose looks are...ah...distinct in undesirable ways can be the quite pleasant and considerate without people giving them much credit for it--and that people are going to judge personality a lot more accurately when they don't know that Mr Complete Jerkass has movie star looks & Ms Great Personality was not in fact kidding about what the limits are on facial reconstruction...
(Yes, we've some pretty decent evidence that pretty people can get away with a lot more and visa versa. Some have been repeated mostly to try to get people aware that no, really, looks count for a lot.)
Well, given that you can get Gbit internet some places if you're willing to pay more for the connection, I'm not sure I'm seeing much difference really.
Except that lack of Net Neutrality laws will allow ISPs and such to be sued for the content they prioritize/deprioritize. That's what this is all about, ultimately. Net Neutrality protects ISPs from (some) lawsuits. It won't after this change goes through. If it goes through.
The problem is that what we had was regulations, not laws. Laws would provide the ISPs reliably with that protection in court, and given that the MAFIAA and co have been moving to going after ISPs, the odds are likely very good that ISPs will not fight a law that gives them those protections even if Net Neutrality is explicitly intrinsic to getting said protections.
Well, if we're going to talk about my current job; their offices are in entirely in NYC. I'm not going to keep working with them if they decide for some reason I must work from their office, because NYC is expensive and they don't pay anywhere near enough to cover the cost of actually living in NYC. The point really would be to discourage them by upping the cost to them by making such a demand.
I overall suspect that the theory that this is a stealthed layoff is right--especially since IBM has a track record of supporting remote workers as a model and copious evidence that it's quite effective. Plus, you're going to lose money if they all stick around and you have to find sufficient space to have that many more people in your offices without breaking laws. The fire marshal alone might get rather annoyed.
It's pretty much done pretty much entirely for the benefit of the social media sites' owners--gamificaion increases views, which increases the money ads earn. The main thing that can be done to counter it at the moment is ad blocking, to break their part of the reward cycle.
to label alcoholic beverages with calorie information,
What the fuck is wrong with that?
There's been an ongoing problem with stupid, stupid girls who skip meals so they can 'spend' their calories on booze. This makes the alcohol have a stronger effect on them and causes all sorts of nutritional disorders because they're effectively cutting back on nutrients--yes, they end up thin. Starving yourself works quite well for that. This doesn't make it healthy, and quite a few of these twits end up in the ER with alcohol poisoning. Some who manage to avoid that will get brain damage.
It doesn't help that--outside of maybe Everclear--the calories contained in a serving of alcohol will vary from batch to batch, with some alcoholic beverages having greater variations than others.
The simple fact that nobody seems to be asking if the calorie information is in fact doing anything to counter obesity is also a problem. This is a theory, it is an easily tested theory, can we actually do that instead of assuming it's true? Given that my experience is that among those I know, the group of 'people who care' has been contained entirely with 'people who have eating disorders'...I'm a bit skeptical that giving the calorie counts actually works, and for making good nutritional choices? It's useless, because calories merely are a measure of energy, not of overall nutritional value, and you certainly cannot reduce that to a single number.
You'll likely need to contact the original authors. Getting sample surveys should be as easy as a polite request; getting at the raw data may take distinctly more, and it's probably best if you get a bit of a conversation going first, if nothing else to find out what information about the subjects is in there. If there's stuff with a strong risk of letting you identify subjects, they should be not very willing to share it. (Standard ethical rules: You don't out your subjects without their permission, and generally you insist they out themselves and you confirm.)
Not necessarily--a remote worker doesn't have quite the same contact with the culture in the workplace. It is not my employers' fault for hiring me if I find that, as a remote worker, I am managing to be protected from the hostile work environment created by the in-house culture. It can also be that, well, what makes the difference is as simple as if your coworkers can see you: being a remote worker can be quite sufficient to prevent discrimination for some.
I'd expect it to be easier to go for breach of contract, though, and I'd not assume that IBM's contract covers this already. You're assuming that the execs are listening to legal and their legal department is competent, and we've seen multiple cases where it is rather definitely not the case. Many times, what's actually being thought may be that it doesn't matter, nobody is going to dare take them to court anyway.
Plus, if I'm signing a contract for a job were I am out to be a remote worker? I'm not signing the contract unless it is clear that this is the job that I am being hired for--and if the contract says my employer can insist on it, I'm going to want it explicit in the contract that they pay for my relocation costs & possibly also a raise to counterbalance the effective paycut. (I'm not talking just commute time, but also issues such as differences local cost of living. What's a good salary in one place can be practically nothing in another.)
You need to also be factoring in the ability of the current power grid to withstand the vastly increased demand and the changes in the cost of electricity that will be involved, as well as overall logistics. I think the assumption by the study is probably not taking these issues into account--especially since it seems to involve interesting assumptions about the global availability of electricity (perhaps those involved in the study could use a nice tour of less-developed countries?) and the logistical problems caused by NIMBYism when it comes to building, maintaining, and doing the vital improvements to the power grid.
Regardless of the ultimate outcome, the problem is that this prediction is for the near future and global. We can make a pretty good guess how much electricity will be getting generated at best in a decade, if nothing else because any power plant that's going to be running by 2027 is already in the planning stages.
I'd not be surprised if we can make a reasonably accurate guess about the maximum potential capacity in 2037, given how long it can take simply to get power plants built in places with severe NIMBYism, and let's not forget that there's parts of the world where it is highly impractical to have a power grid...
Really, I'd place my bets on straight-up fuel cells winning, at least globally, for that last reason.
A good example of both genres--mysteries and ironic-twists--is one where you do enjoy rereading it despite the ending, because the endings will have been forshadowed properly. You'll not be trying to solve the mystery or be surprised by the twist again, you'll be looking for the things that give away the criminal beforehand, or made the ironic twist feel like it isn't just a sudden alien space bat swooping down from above but rather actually very appropriate.
I generally take the view that if they can't be bothered to make the trailer not have spoilers, the movie itself probably isn't worth seeing either. I don't count things that are misleading either by looking like spoilers or are spoilers but will send you in the wrong direction here--I mean that if I pretty much get everything but the end of the movie in the trailer, then I figure the movie itself is mostly padding.
I'm glad you mentioned Samurai Pizza Cats! The original show, by all reports, was just really meh--it wasn't bad, it hit all the right notes, it just was nothing whatsoever remarkable in quality any direction. The thing is, they couldn't give it an accurate dub, because of the state it arrived in: They didn't throw away the original script because that would require they actually got it in the first place.
Also, caring about the lip sync is definitely something that varies by culture...as is if the local preference is for subtitles or dubs...
You are aware that languages have levels of formality, and in many it's explicitly present? They're not just present, they're recognized well enough that there's names for the levels within the language and phrases that use it to describe somebody being too familiar (or distant) with a person. English is actually weird-ish in that it doesn't make the divisions clear in its modern form--you're made to guess what level of casualness to use at a given point.
There are similar problems with children who are never punished and let run wild as well.
You can punish a child without resorting to hitting them, and "letting them run wild" is not the only alternative.
That's nice. However, the problem is a large section of the population appears to believe exactly that--that it's either only beating for everything, or let their kids run wild--because that's pretty how pop psych interprets the research right now, with a sidecar of "Mai widdle angel would never [whatever, up to and including felonies that will get you murdered in jail]" right up until their precious is well into adulthood. Because, let's make this clear, it's utterly and completely true in their minds.
If you want to know how pop psych looks to somebody who's studied the actual subject, it's kind of like seeing people insisting that you can totally round pi...to 4...in any and all circumstances, but especially when dealing with small numbers.
Right now, it's pretty common for people with significant mental health issues to end up in prison anyway--either intentionally, or simply because mental health issues tend to do a number on your ability to not break laws. Many prison systems if not all now do provide mental health services, and aren't going to be pretty much stuck booting you out the door the moment you're together enough to no longer an immediate danger to self or others. (Incidentally, don't leave out the immediate part, it is important. It's not sufficient for you to be openly planning, say, to go shoot up a bunch of innocent orphans--if you're not going to be doing it by tomorrow, you can't be forcibly committed.)
Society already is picking up the costs for those who end up in severe enough crisis, and the social safety net has inherit to itself the assumption that it is not only possible & desirable to cure everything but this cure is just around the corner--which causes significant problems for anybody for whom this is not at all true. A lot of mental health issues may not be curable--and there's actually serious questions about if it'd be ethical to anyway--and what you actually can expect to attain is a tenuous to transient stability. A reliable support system built around the idea of providing the necessary resources to permit & enable the greatest possible degree of self-sufficiency possible would most likely ultimately prove cheaper to society overall.
The current system is, pretty much by law, forced to act like pills are majykkal potions which will work reliably, appear somehow in the patient's possessions, and induce the patient to take them. The fact that many patients may need a while to get to where they can get a job capable of covering their meds, may have bought into the horribly common belief that pills are majykkal potions of cure (not even health), or can flat-out be expected to have their medications stop working... Not only does the current state-run system ignore this which almost certainly increases the costs to society, the assumptions are sufficiently built in that it may be at best only impractical to pry them out through reform, and I've rather little expectation that the state will be particularly tolerant of any attempt to provide much aid outside of its control.
I'm not surprised by 'room and board, and pocket money,' but I'd want to see just how this differs from normal pay for teachers in those countries--both in amounts and local buying power. How much it pays can also change a lot depending on what skills you've got and what precisely you're teaching--in general K12 (or local equivalent) pays the least, if you don't count tutoring in.
Since I've got degrees from a university in an English-speaking country, I can get myself pretty easily a job teaching English in Japan--don't know about other countries--and I know that at points people have been able to fund going to college in Japan--and attending a place in Tokyo--by teaching English there. YMMV, of course.
English is considered one of the hardest languages to learn, for much the same reasons Arabic is on that list--it makes a lot of use of idiom and imagery, and English has a significantly large vocabulary because of its tendency to mug languages for spare vocabulary.
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are all on that list, too, and not just because of the use of Chinese characters: They all have some degree of tonality, which can literally change the meaning of a word--there's some sentences in Chinese which are the same syllable, repeatedly, with different tones...which make perfect sense if you have the required ear for telling. (If your native language is tonal, it may be easier, but...not necessarily. Also, 'one or two sillabels'? No. I speak two of those languages. I'm not even sure where you're getting the idea that tenses are any simpler--technically maybe, but that's only because they use particles for things most European languages use conjugation and declension to do, and English generally does with word order. Oh, and formal/informal distinctions exist and you can have a level of "More Formal Still" to "Very Close Informal" and using the wrong level with somebody is an insult. Gender also sometimes pops up, though not in the grammatical sense.)
Japanese and Chinese people's English can be bad because English is a hard, hard language--and, well, there's some distinctions between sounds, such as l & r, that their languages don't make. Learning those is surprisingly hard if you didn't start as an infant, and even then you might have trouble making those sounds yourself.
Unlikely, that. One of the acid tests for translation is to have them translate a text, producing a smooth translation, and then you hand their work to another translator to translate back, blindly of course. The back translation, if the initial translation is good, should be close to the original text--it doesn't need to be the same words, but you certainly should have the same 'sense' to it.
Mechanical translators are not really close to passing that test on a reliable basis, and computers may well need to be capable of reliably & accurately taking instructions in natural languages to reach that point. From experience, though, picking a language everybody in the group knows is likely to be the preference offline--they might be used to help close gaps in vocabulary and understanding of idiomatic language, but they'd be more annoying trouble in conversation than even the most mangled common tongue.
That's not quite how it works at all; Latin was a dead language--meaning no native speakers anymore--for most of its importance as a common language for international communications, which should be a big hint that the number of native speakers and their economic importance has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with a language getting the job.
French got popular because it was fashionable among the elites and used for international diplomacy. It fell out of use because...well...fashionable ought to be a hint, and France also pretty much screwed itself over on the 'international diplomacy' front. (See: French history.)
German fell out of use in science because WWI, WWII, and the fact that a rather stunningly large number of people for some reason just decided they really didn't want to be Germans and left. (See: World history.)
At this point it's probably more likely than not that English would actually go the way of Latin--it'll stay important for a significant period of time even if all English-speaking countries suddenly disappeared tomorrow, because so many people have it as a second language. It's somewhat easier than switching to Mandarin--English may be one of the hardest languages to learn, but unless your native tongue is tonal then the difficulties in English will definitely hit a lot farther into learning it than they will with learning Mandarin. Spanish...well, the different versions are generally mutually intelligible right now, but...
Though, really, if we're going by the largest population in the EU should be setting the importance of a language to the EU, I'd think then that Arabic would be hands-down the most important one by now.
You're assuming that he's also for a permanent standing military.
Which wouldn't be quite a problem if a generic was out, or expected out anytime soon--have you seen some of what the FDA insists of generics? It's got to be 'exact same,' which has actually caused designs that are improvements to get bounced.
Yes. Because the concept of a "generic" is that it is marketed as identical to the brand name product except for the brand.
If they are not identical there could be cases where substituting the generic for the brand name or vice versa is DANGEROUS. And thefore marketing them as identical is dangerously misleading. If the drug company has an improvement they should get the new improved drug approved. They can even patent it if they want (they might have to license the base drug/process in order to produce their improved variant).
I can tell you don't actually know what you're talking about!
First off, the generic is not necessarily identical, it normally is just substantially identical, as in "it has the exact same stats." It isn't necessarily a perfect clone, it's literally the sort of difference you get between a brand name product and something that's, well, not...and on occasions you will have perfectly valid medical reasons to prefer to go on-brand (or off, depending) such as allergies.
So, moving on. EpiPens are actually not that reliable in function--I forget what the failure rate is, but it's actually disturbingly high--and merely having your generic version simply work reliably is sufficient for the FDA to reject it as a generic.
Second, getting anything in the way of a medical device through the current FDA approval process is a Kafkaesque nightmare, especially when it's just a minor improvement on previous iterations as the FDA don't care, you're doing the testing from scratch. This is precisely why there's sometimes a distinct effort to avoid having the FDA decide to wave its magic wand over something and declare it a medical device--especially since yes, the absurdity implied by Kafkaesque is definitely present.
This is pretty much what is wanted when you're out to get regulatory capture: You get the regulations written so as to effectively ensure that you have little to no competition. Deregulation actually is not something Mylan would want--because if you made the regulations reasonable, they would have to actually spend money on things like making better EpiPens.
Which wouldn't be quite a problem if a generic was out, or expected out anytime soon--have you seen some of what the FDA insists of generics? It's got to be 'exact same,' which has actually caused designs that are improvements to get bounced.
It doesn't help that while yes, they did certainly cut down on that infamous paperwork backlog, they did a lot of it by rejecting as improperly-filled-out forms that, at the time they'd been filed, had been--and filing again with whatever the current version of the form is will just get you at the end of the queue, with no certainty that they won't change the rules between now and when they finally get around to actually processing it. Would it be too much to require that the paperwork be processed according to the rules at the time the paperwork was filed, at least if it's been allowed to sit around for a certain length of time beforehand? (If this seems dangerous: Combine it with soft transitions and penalties for the bureaucracy having too great a backlog, set up so that if that rule has to be applied to paperwork being processed now, the penalties for the backlog are also hitting.)
Well, I suppose that saves Mylan on bribes to get that precious, precious regulatory capture that they've also been using to block competing tech from the US market.